


said the snakebite to the bone

by besselfcn



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Dissociation, F/M, Gang Rape, Gunplay, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort/Fear TM, Object Penetration, Threats of Violence, Vomiting, brief suicidal ideation mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:42:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23480392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: John has been off on a two weeks long trip to Valentine for nine or ten days when the men show up at Beecher’s Hope.
Relationships: Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston, Abigail Roberts Marston/OMCs
Comments: 7
Kudos: 33





	said the snakebite to the bone

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes, you are in an unprecedented global crisis & you just decide to take the time to write some very deeply indulgent id fic with little-to-no redeeming qualities

John has been off on a two weeks long trip to Valentine for nine or ten days when the men show up at Beecher’s Hope.

Abigail glances up from washing the dishes from dinnertime to see them standing at the edge of the farm. They’re too far to make out much of the details, but her blood runs dead cold with an instinctual _knowing_ anyhow--one of the last useful things Dutch Van der Linde left her with. The bone-deep fear of two figures with bowler hats and brown patched vests under long duster coats they wear like it’s armor.

One of them looks down at a pocket watch. They both start drawing nearer.

“Jack,” she says. She sees him in the corner of her vision, reading a book at the kitchen table. She does not take her eyes off the men. “I’m going to ask you to do something very brave, and you are not to argue with your mama, you understand me?”

Jack stiffens. He knows, too, even if he don’t remember.

“Alright, Mama,” he say. He’s trying to get her to catch his eye.

“Go out the back door,” she says. “Go straight back to the barn and take one of the horses out of the stable there. It don’t matter which one, even if it’s one of the working horses. Take her straight into Blackwater and find that shopkeeper always gives you extra peppermints for the horses. Tell him your mama is in need of some help at the ranch and to bring along his shotgun just in case. You understand me?”

He looks--tries to look--towards where she’s at, but she shifts her weight onto her other leg to block his view. “Mama?” he asks, and he sounds smaller than his fourteen years and it sparks that anger deep in her chest that’s always lying there, just waiting.

“You do as I say, Jack,” she rasps. The men walk past the fenced entryway.

Jack’s pulling his boots on, still looking at her. “It’s late,” he says, hesitating towards the back door. “What if the shop’s closed?”

“He lives up above the shop,” she says. “You bang on his door until he answers you. Now go.”

He opens his mouth like he’s gonna say something else.

Then he goes.

She allows herself two deep breaths, and one palm slammed against the kitchen counter and a shout of fury before she straightens up, dries up the water on the counter, and waits for the knock at the door.

It’s two sharp, short raps against the hardwood.

She answers the door with a smile.

She doesn’t recognize them. One of them’s younger, got a clean-shaven face and this casual, smug look about him, leaning up against the siding of the house already like he’s bored. Other’s got a short and well-kept beard, a little older, a little more muscle, hand resting at his waistline over where she knows his holster is.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” she says.

“Evening, ma’am,” the younger one says. “Name’s Agent Brennan. Partner here is Agent Finch. You mind if we come on in, ask you some questions?”

He’s already standing up straight and pushing past her into the foyer.

Abigail steps back. “What sorts of questions you got?” she says. “And sorry, didn’t catch what agency it was you two was from.”

Finch says, “Your husband is Mr. John Marston, that right?”

Abigail breathes. In. Out. “So I’m told,” she says. “He get into some sort of trouble?”

“No, no,” Finch says, shaking his head. “No sort of trouble. Just a couple of things needed following up on, thought we ought to make a house call. Seems he ain’t around right now, though.”

“He’s gone out for a walk at the river,” she says. “Clears his head. May be able to catch him there if you go lookin’, but he don’t take no usual route, so might be best if you come along again tomorrow morning when he ought to be here.”

Finch hums, an unpleasant sort of noise from his chest.

Brennan says, “Nice house you got here, ma’am. Very tidy place.”

“Thank you, sir,” Abigail says. Her fists clench. Out the window, she sees Jack riding off and exhales a breath she wasn’t meaning to hold. “My uncle, he lives upstairs in the attic. He’s up there now and he ain’t a very deep sleeper so I’d prefer if we could keep this brief so as not to disturb him too badly.”

“That so?” Brennan asks. He picks up that photograph of her and John at the photo studio; she wants to smack it right out of his hands. “Finch, didn’t we see an old man seemed like he could be Mrs. Marston’s uncle who was getting shit-faced at the saloon in town?”

Abigail’s breathing stops.

“Thought we did,” Finch agrees. “Seems strange you didn’t know he’d headed out.”

“I think you two had better leave now,” Abigail says, voice as hard as she can make it. “If you have any inquiries for me you can ask them in the morning when my husband’s--”

Brennan grabs her by the hair and slams her cheekbone into the dining table so hard that stars explode behind her eyes.

She tries to kick out but he’s got his body weight pinned up against her already, an elbow digging into her spine with the other hand braced up against the table. Finch crouches down beside her, right up to eye level, a placid calm in his face that seems to run all the way down to his bones.

“I think we’ll stay a bit longer, if that’s alright with you,” he says, and Brennan pushes his hand up her skirts and along her thigh, fingers brushing rough against her underclothes.

Abigail’s mind’s gone blank of all but two thoughts, cycling around one another unendingly: _this cannot be happening_ and _this is already happening, and you might as well stop fighting it_.

“If you want money we got cash in the fireplace.” Her hands have gone numb. Her tongue is heavy. “Behind the loose brick. It’s emergency money, all I got on me. You can take it.”

Brennan pushes her skirts up above her hips. “Mrs. Marston,” he says, and his breath is hot and wet on the back of her neck. “I think you know we aren’t looking for any of your money.”

They readjust her, like she weighs nothing; Finch takes her arms, holds both wrists with one hand over her head, the other hand pressing her face into the wood table so all leverage she might have is gone.

“Just thought John might want to know what could happen if he keeps leaving his nice little family to go around West Elizabeth causing all sorts of trouble,” Finch says.

 _Don’t say his name,_ Abigail thinks, inanely. _You don’t get to say his name_.

Brennan’s hands find her underwear and grip, and he tears it right along the seam with a sound that sends a jolt through her heart before gripping her hips with both hands, tight enough to bruise.

She stares at Finch. His eyes are bright and shining. He’s smiling.

“Please don’t do this,” she tries, desperately, and then there’s a hot and searing pain in her abdomen as Brennan pushes into her all the way to the hilt.

A breath of air is forced out of her lungs and her body screams at her to get away; her knees buckle, but he holds her up, pulls back and fucks into her again slow, like he’s savoring it, breathing getting heavier behind her. “Fuck,” he says, “For a retired whore, you’ve still got a tight little pussy, don’t you?”

Abigail gasps in a desperate breath. Keep breathing. Her fingers scrabble for purchase that they can’t find. Keep breathing. He slams into her so hard her teeth rattle in her skull. All she needs to do is to keep breathing.

“Come on, now,” Brennan says, “don’t make that face. You like getting fucked, don’t you, now?”

He brings his hand around to fumble at her clit, and it’s the overwhelming sensation of it that finally starts her crying, short and desperate little breaths as her head goes fuzzy from a lack of air.

“That’s it,” one of them says, and she doesn’t know who it is, the sounds all blending together. “There you go, enjoy yourself.”

“Let me have a turn at her,” Finch says, like he’s bored, and an insane laugh almost finds its way out of her throat.

After a few more thrusts Brennan pulls out of her--and then for a brief, fleeting moment, they both let go.

She runs.

She tries to run.

She gets as far as pushing herself off the table and stumbling towards the door before one of them catches her by her dress and drags her to the ground, her skull rattling off the floor, vision going double as they pin her down again, arms and legs kicking wildly.

“Abigail, Abigail,” one of them says. “You do have some spitfire in you, don’t you, girl?”

They peel off the outer layer of her dress, somehow, wrestle it off her so hard she feels her shoulder might dislocate, and then she’s just left in her brassiere and they leave that on, for some reason, as if it matters anymore. One of them holds her arms down and the other settles between her legs and pushes them apart--FInch, probably, Brennan, maybe, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter--and starts raping her again.

She’s being raped. It’s such a stupid thought to have--an unimaginably obvious fact, a thought that does nothing to stop the reality of it, or dull the pain that blooms in her stomach, or refocus her eyes, jostled still by the impact with the ground--but it swells and fills her head. She’s being raped. These men hate John, or the men who hired them hates John, or it’s not about John at all and they only say it is, and it doesn’t matter, and the end result is she’s being raped on the floor of the house he built to keep her safe.

Abigail detaches.

The pain dulls; the ringing in her ears grows louder. She used to do this, she remembers, with men who were particularly bad at sex back when she took pay for it; move outside herself, look down from somewhere else until it’s over. She watches as these two men pin this girl down. One of them younger, one of them older. Both of them saying things she can’t hear anymore.

They lift the girl up and turn her over, tell her to _get on your hands and knees_ , and she obeys them, quiet, not crying anymore. One of them forces her jaw open with his fingers dug into her jawbone, says, _if you bite down, we’ll leave your fucking corpse for your husband to find, you hear me?_ and she nods, so he shoves his cock down her throat.

Breathe out through your nose, Abigail thinks. The girl sputters, and chokes. She’s shaking like she’s cold.

He thrusts, and he hits the back of her throat--she retches, involuntary shudders wracking her body, and he pulls out just before the bile rises in her throat and she vomits on the hardwood floor.

 _Fucking disgusting,_ one of them says, and the pull her away from it, push her back down onto her stomach, head turned to the side. Abigail feels the new sensations rising through the fog--a burning in her throat, an acrid smell in her nose. A pressure between her thighs that won’t go away, no matter how she tries and fails to move her legs.

Her eyes fix on the frame of the front door, the swirling wood grain that forms the archway.

She’s been here before. In other ways, with other men. Tied to a chair in a warehouse in the backwaters of Van Horn, hearing about how her husband was dead, how she and her son were about to be next. She never spoke to them, because she’d been taught not to speak to them, because she’d been taught everything she knew by a man who valued loyalty over everything else, even love and reason and your own damned life.

And then like out of a fairy-tale the door crashed in and Arthur, all framed in light, bought her the time, gave her the gun. She remembers the sound Milton’s head made when it exploded, the thump of his body hitting the floor. She remembers nothing else in her life had ever felt like that, so dark and so freeing all at once, and she remembers wondering if that’s how Arthur had felt all the time, and if that’s what was really killing him, in the end.

If she could only wait long enough, maybe he’d walk in again.

They flip her over. Abigail, the girl. Whichever one. This time they’re slower; more deliberate. Her thighs are all slick with a mixture of blood and her own wetness, her body trying to protect itself against something it doesn’t understand. Every movement sends pain through her, and then a wave of something else; a dull, building pressure that threatens to overwhelm her. They change positions, once, or twice, but it goes on, her limbs all going heavy, her teeth still clattering like she’s freezing, and then for a second Abigail has the presence of mind to think no, no, no, and then the orgasm overtakes her, body pulled taut like a bowstring.

 _Fuck,_ one of them laughs. The other says, _told you she’d come_.

 _Bet she’s got another one in her,_ one of them says, and he closes a hand around her throat, and she doesn’t think of anything at all.

Later she’ll wonder if he choked her into unconsciousness, or if the reality of what was happening to her was enough that her mind shut itself off to keep herself alive. Keep herself breathing. She doesn’t know, now--all she knows is she loses time, that next she’s aware she’s been moved again, and there’s a hand slapping at the side of her face, impatient and harsh until she opens her eyes.

 _Hey,_ he snaps. _Hey, fucking look at me, yeah? I got something_ “important to show you,” and he twists his wrist forward and pushes the gun deeper inside her and, oh, God, there’s a gun inside her.

There’s a gun inside her. There’s a gun inside her. She knows it hurts, somewhere in her mind--that it’s a kind of pain she can’t put words to, fear and sharp edges and a brutal soreness that isn’t going to go away--but the adrenaline-shock keeps her whole body numb and centered around only the one thought. There’s a gun inside her.

“No,” she babbles, all control over her tongue gone. “Please, God, please, I have a son, you can’t do this, please”

“Listen closely, then,” the man says. She doesn’t remember his name anymore. She doesn’t remember a thing about him. “You tell your husband that there’s men know where he is, and he’d do good to stay right there. Otherwise, some folks not as nice as us might come calling.”

He pulls the gun out. She feels a scream in the back of her throat that she lets out as a shuddering gasp.

“Better get moving,” the other man says. He’s at the window, looking out.

“Roger.” The man puts his gun back in his holster. “You have a good evening now, Mrs. Marston,” he says, and she hears their footsteps both towards the back door, and then it closing soft behind them.

The house is quiet.

It’s quiet.

Abigail sits up. The floor is cold. Her dress is across the room; it might as well be miles. She lifts a hand to her hair without knowing why; it comes away sticky white, and she retches empty. She needs to get to the sink. She needs to draw a bath. She needs to clean up this mess. She hadn’t even finished putting away the dinnerware.

There’s footsteps on the porch.

Not again. Not again. She can’t do it again.

“Mrs. Marston?”

She puts her forehead to her knees.

“Mrs. Marston, you alright in there? Your son Jack said you’d sent for some help with a gun, but I ain’t see any wild animals on your property. Everything alright?”

Oh, God. Oh, Jack. No, no, no.

“Mrs. Marston,” he says, and she shuts her eyes, and her head feels heavier even as she does it. “I’m awful sorry, but I’m worried for you and I’m gonna come on in now--oh, _Christ_. Oh, Christ, kid, you stay out there, no, I said you stay--go back into town and get a doctor now, hurry on. Your mama’s hurt, I said run. Oh, Christ Almighty.”

\---

For the next two days, she sleeps.

Jack brings her broth. She tries to drink it; most of it, she can’t keep down.

She hears Uncle talking in quiet voices around the ranch, a mournful tone in his voice she’s never heard before.

She’s worried, the way they’re carrying on, that maybe she’s died and hasn’t realized it yet.

\---

On the third morning, she wakes up to see John sitting on the edge of the bed, head between his knees.

“It ain’t your fault, John,” she hears. Sadie. Oh, Sadie.

“Don’t you say that,” he snaps. His voice is low and dangerous.

Sadie scoffs. “Don’t _you_ talk to _me_ as if you know the first thing about something like this, you hear?”

The room goes tense and quiet, the way it always does when those two stubborn fools get into some sort of disagreement.

Abigail reaches a hand out. “John,” she rasps. Her voice is all a ruin.

He starts. “Abi,” he says, and he reaches out like he’s about to touch her but stops short.

“Come here, you idiot,” she tells him, and he pulls her in and rocks her back and forth like she’s a child once again.

\---

Normalcy seeps back into her life bit by bit.

Sadie stays longer than she really has an excuse to. She tells Abigail she can talk about it, if she likes; she doesn’t, but it’s comforting somehow to have the option. Sadie will sit with her at night when she can’t sleep, and walk with her outside when she feels too cooped up inside her own home. Sadie lets Abigail brush out her horse’s coat, even over all the burn scars the poor mare has mottling her skin, and there’s a rhythmic soothing in it.

John--

John is John. He’ll always be John. He drinks and rages, but not where she can see. Where she can see him, he’s soft, a quiet rage boiling beneath him. When she sits down for dinner one day and starts shaking, he waits as patient as she’s ever seen him for her to tell him what the problem is.

“The table,” she says, finally. “They--”

The next day, the table’s gone, and a new one in its place.

She knows there’s guilt that Uncle carries around. For not being there, for not coming home. He goes out drinking less, like that’ll matter. She tries to explain to him why it won’t, but she can’t find the words.

None of it matters, she wants to tell him. Years and years spent on the run and this is where they found us. It doesn’t matter.

But it gets him working around the farm some days out of nothing else but boredom, so she can’t much complain.

Some days she wakes up shaking with nightmares, a new batch to add to the old rotation. Some days when John touches her she can’t hardly breathe through it. Some days she thinks she’d rather they did leave her dead for John to find, and she tells him as much.

Other days he touches her under the covers at night, soft and slow and with his mouth pressed up against her, and it’s like the cold air of the open starry night sky.

John stays at the ranch more often now. At first every day, and then they fight about it--and then he’s never gone more than a day, more than two. He’s got fear written into his bones, and she can read it off of him and it echoes inside her, overwhelms her more often than not.

“If you act like it’s the end of the damn world, John, I’m gonna start feeling like it is,” she snaps at him once, finally, and he leaves for four days and when he comes back they find themselves still safe.

Little by little, they return to normal.

On a cold morning in 1911, he leaves Beecher’s Hope again.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter [@besselfcn](https://www.twitter.com/besselfcn)


End file.
